<p>So, I'm 55, and still trying to figure that out for myself. (I think I want to be a pixie.) Actually, I just wrote a magazine article (one of my columns) on how it happened for me, so if you'll indulge me:</p>
<p>Secret Spaces, Hidden Places</p>
<p>So weve titled our column What Really Matters, a place to sort through our experience, both in the education of our homeschooled children, in the culture at large, and in our own journeys. We are seeking to hold up to the light what did indeed make a difference in our lives, what was a waste of time and energy, what held us back and what moved us forward in that spiral dance we call living. In case, I havent done so yet, I want to thank Mary and Michael Leppert, the publishers of The Link, for this opportunity.</p>
<p>Try as I may, I find it difficult to reconstruct the emotional tenor of my teen years. The little of what I can conjure up is that of a confused adolescent, without strong emotional attachments, and rather flat affect. I grew up in a working class town inside the New York City limits. Today, Bellerose has some quarter of a million residents (making it what would be by far the second largest city in Washington State, where I now reside, but to this day you wont find it on any maps.) There were lots of Irish Catholic firemen and policeman, folks who worked at the nearby Sperry Gyroscope Plant, and upwardly mobile but relative poor Jewish folks who managed to buy houses in the early 1950s with subsidized GI loans. </p>
<p>What is interesting to know about my town is that it had no bookstore, no record store, no community orchestra, no playhouse (one movie theater), no town band. There were no lectures outside of those held at churches or synagogues, not even in the very small town library, Concerts in the park would be long in the future. There were no dance studios or art classes or nature clubs as far as I am aware, and a very small Little League (most folks couldnt afford it, and thought it was rather strange anyway, since one could play stickball for free). No Elks or Rotaries from what I can recall, though there were all kinds of Masons the traditional variety for Protestants, Knights of Pythias for Jewish folks, Knights of Columbus for Catholics. These religious and, to some degree, ethnic lines were never crossed. (Our Cub and Boy Scout troops were equally segregated; as, for the most part, were our public school classes, but thats the stuff of another essay.) Folks commuted to work, and came home, though it was in an age where homemaker was still considered a respectable occupation. My mother read, mostly novels I think she became a schoolteacher while I was young; I dont believe my father ever read a book in his life, though he had a subscription to National Geographic, where I think he satisfied his thirst for barebreasted women.</p>
<p>Anyhow, I was a smart kid, or so it was thought, and was accepted into a science magnet public high school in Manhattan, which meant an hour and a half trip each way to and from (one bus, and a minimum of two subway trains, though sometimes I used to vary it, and could make it in the same time by taking four.) School was a dreary shower about which I can tell more than my share of tragicomic stories (and often do), though almost none of them about anything I learned (about which I remember virtually nothing.) But I was good at it, and well-rewarded for my efforts and hence thought I liked it, then, and for the next decade. I had no mentors. I knew no scientists, mathematicians, poets, doctors, lawyers, journalists, engineers, automechanics, woodworkers; in fact, to the best of my memory, my life was bereft of significant adults, an emptiness that I still grieve to this day.</p>
<p>I dont know exactly how this happened, but one of my fellow students (likely from the school debating team) must have told me about the Brentanos bookstore up on 47th Street. From what I can recall, I had never been in a bookstore before (though my father used to buy me Golden Nature Guides in a local malt shop. Looking back at it, this seems even more remarkable to me, as growing up, I dont remember knowing anyone who visited a bookstore, and never any members of my immediate or extended family.) I can see myself walking down the open spiral staircase with marble stairs to the academic books department, and standing before a set of pinewood shelves virtually under them, labeled Sociology. I dont remember knowing what Sociology was. But, over a period of months, I purchased several books, some of which I own to this day. They clearly date me. There was Edgar Friedenburgs Coming of Age in America, Paul Goodmans Growing Up Absurd (which strongly influenced John Holt), Camus The Rebel, David Riesmans The Lonely Crowd, and works by the psychologist Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted and Young Radicals. I have no clue as where I could have heard of such books, but now that I look back at them, the very titles suggest the various compartments of my adolescent mind. I hardly recollect what was in any of them (though I have long since reread the first three), I never discussed them with anyone (and certainly not my family), but I can strongly summon up the memory of standing silently before the sociology shelf in the store, and somehow feeling very
adult. I would return. </p>
<p>I was soon to make an even greater discovery. One day on one of my rare visits to Brentanos, I left the store through the 47th Street exit, and walked down the street. 47th, between 5th and 6th Avenues, is still the center of the New York diamond district, and the street was full of bearded and forelocked Hasidic men, in black gabardine coats, white shirts, and hats, noisily proceeding from store to store where, through the windows, one could see the diamond cutters in skullcaps at their machines. But in the middle of the block on the north side was a little store that proclaimed Gotham Book Mart on the window, with slightly peeling letters reading Wise Men Fish Here. You had to take two steps down to get in. Inside, along the walls of what seemed almost like a long, poorly-lit corridor, and on shelves protruding from the walls, and on tables arrayed in a straight line the full distance of the store, were books, often piled high, and not even too neatly, as well as several desks. It didnt feel at all like Brentanos, no, it was more like a shrine. An elderly grayhaired woman sat by the window, taking in what was left of the late afternoon light. (I was much later to learn that this woman was Francis Steloff, the proprietor of Gotham, the New York equivalent of Paris Shakespeare & Co. -- the most important literary bookstore in the United States and who championed the work of Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, e.e. cummings, and Gertrude Stein, and whose other customers read like a whos who of the Twentieth Century literary world.) She smiled at me when I walked in, but didnt say anything, and that was welcome enough.</p>
<p>My first emotion was one of fear. The books on the wall facing the entrance way were all expensive-looking, leather-bound editions, often tooled with goldleaf and I frankly would have been afraid to touch them. It was both Ms. Steloffs smile and nod, and my fear of the volumes out front that propelled me further into the store. For whatever reason, I picked up books of poetry, I who had never heard of Keats or Shelley, Blake or Byron, and who had been tortured with Shakespeare in junior high school along with the rest of my classmates, and forced to learn all ten uplifting stanzas of Felicia Hemans Casabianca (The boy stood on the burning deck
), with which I can torture others to this day. (I warn you not to ask unless you are prepared for the consequences.) But, no, these were first editions from little presses from around the world, and I discovered Diane Wakoski and Diane di Prima (two of the three huntresses of my life, the other being the singer Laura Nyro), and Kenneth Patchen and I became friends. This wasnt anything like what they taught in English class! This was secret knowledge, obtained during stolen moments after school, in a place that no one else in my world would even be able to find unless they knew what they were looking for, and they wouldnt.</p>
<p>But wait, there was more. I discovered that the second floor of the Gotham Book Mart was inhabited by the James Joyce Society. I never got to go in apparently, all the meetings were held in the evening (when I was home in Bellerose with my four hours of homework), and I wouldnt have known what they did at the James Joyce Society in any case. I barely knew who he was (I didnt read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Ulysses until I was in college, and, actually and I say this with a little bit of shame -- never liked them particularly.) But someone told me that one of the activities of the James Joyce Society was to, once a year, do an all day/all-night reading of Finnegans Wake. (Note: Gotham sold its old location, but has since reopened two blocks away at 16 East 46th Street, between Madison and 5th Avenue. The Joyce Society, Finnegans Wake Society, and the Wake Watchers Reading Group have all relocated there as well. <a href="http://www.finneganswake.org/GothamBookMart.htm%5B/url%5D">www.finneganswake.org/GothamBookMart.htm</a> .If you are ever in New York
.)</p>
<p>(end of Part 1)</p>